Review by New York Times Review
Two books on Roosevelt, one examining his first 100 days, the other his court-packing maneuvers. HIS chin jutting upward, his cigarette holder poised between his teeth, his broad grin radiating confidence - illustrations in both Time and The New Yorker last November rendered Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt redivivus. With the financial system imploding and doctrinaire conservatism roundly discredited, the comparisons in the news media between the two presidents-elect at their inaugural moments are as predictable as they are ubiquitous. Great expectations, too, will hover over Obama during his much awaited first hundred days. It might seem a stroke of luck that Adam Cohen, an editorial writer for The New York Times, has just written "Nothing to Fear" - the third history in three years of what's often called Roosevelt's "first New Deal." But that luck is an illusion. The idea that any president's first hundred days form his window of opportunity to accomplish bold things has been an article of faith since Roosevelt's dazzling debut in 1933. Every subsequent president has seen the interval as his best chance to set the tone for his administration. Publishing a book so soon after two other fine introductions to the same topic - one by the journalist Jonathan Alter, one by the historian Anthony Badger - creates an obvious challenge. But "Nothing to Fear" meets it. Cohen covers a shorter time-span than Alter, who delves into the 1932 campaign and transition, and he cedes to Badger the task of in-depth economic analysis. And if Cohen doesn't stake out a new position in the old debate about whether Roosevelt's agenda was radical, liberal or conservative, neither do the others. All three hail the pragmatic but heroic Roosevelt, with sensible qualifications. Cohen breaks from the pack with his disciplined focus on the spate of legislation that Roosevelt pushed through Congress after his inauguration - 15 major laws, from banking reform and securities regulation to industrial production codes and relief for the destitute. Though these new programs, taken together, lacked ideological coherence, and though a conservative Supreme Court soon struck down some of them, and though Roosevelt often proved an opaque and mercurial leader, the inspired improvisation did set the nation on the road to recovery - and forged a new relationship between people and government. Cohen's well-told story belies the cliché about legislation and sausage-making: his narrative is absorbing and enjoyable to read. Admirably game to tackle the heavy-going details of policy making, "Nothing to Fear" is nonetheless decidedly nonacademic, sparing the lay reader the even heavier-going theorizing found in books like Badger's. One might say it's the kind of history you would expect from a newspaper editorialist. Cohen also finds a niche by concentrating on five key presidential aides. These biographical portraits enliven the policy discussions, so that we're eased into the rigors of the Economy Act through the pennypinching zeal of the budget director Lewis Douglas, and reconciled to a lesson in "domestic allotment" for farmers through the messianic agrarianism of Henry Wallace. This resort to biography is mainly a device. These five New Dealers - the other three are the labor secretary Frances Perkins, the relief administrator Harry Hopkins and the charter "Brain Truster" Raymond Moley - were neither Roosevelt's five closest advisers nor even a closely knit unit; they represent only a sampling of the many planets orbiting Roosevelt's sun. Chronicling the discrete period of a hundred days makes for an appealingly taut narrative. But it can overstate the historical importance of a figure like Douglas, who wielded great clout early on but soon fell from Roosevelt's favor. And suggesting that Roosevelt's first efforts defined the New Deal diminishes both the more radical legislation of the "second New Deal" that began in 1935 (and included the Social Security Act and the pro-labor Wagner Act) and the later turn toward a consumption-oriented liberalism that Alan Brinkley described in "The End of Reform." Cohen's slice-of-history approach, finally, can inhibit the exploration of central themes of the period. Roosevelt's first Inaugural Address, remembered today for the famous quotation that suggested the title for this book, drew the heartiest applause, Cohen reminds us, for its call for "broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency," which Cohen calls an "understated suggestion of autocracy." Although some warned of incipient dictatorship, the desperate times led most citizens to accept if not bless an arrogation of power to the presidency. Cohen rightly pays serious attention to the talk of benign dictatorship, so odd to today's ears. Yet a wider historical lens would also reveal that the public's appetite for executive power had firm limits. In "FDR v. the Constitution: The CourtPacking Fight and the Triumph of Democracy," the journalist Burt Solomon's new account of Roosevelt's failed 1937 gambit to expand the Supreme Court with friendly justices, the specter of Roosevelt as dictator returns. Though Solomon's title is more shrill than his actual argument (the court-packing bill wasn't unconstitutional, just injurious to the separation of powers), the book nonetheless flattens some complexities of the story. It sometimes reads like a morality tale pitting a hubristic president, fresh off a landslide re-election, against a devoutly principled nemesis in Burton Wheeler, a crusading Montana progressive. In truth, the court-packing bill - born of legitimate frustration with the "nine old men" overturning key New Deal enactments - lacked broad support all along, and Wheeler's tendencies were demagogic as well as democratic. Wheeler, who would later oppose the war against Nazism, saw fit to liken Roosevelt to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and other despots who "usurped the power of the legislative and judicial branches of the government in the name of the necessity for haste to promote the general welfare of the masses - and then proceeded to reduce them to servitude." Fiery rhetoric like that showed the robustness of the antimonarchical strains in American political culture dating back to the Revolution. But no book spotlighting just a few months' events can explain the shifting popular dispositions toward Roosevelt's accrual of presidential power throughout the 1930s - dispositions that remained alive and fluid through his bid in 1940 for an unprecedented third term. Yet if Congress's rebuke in the courtpacking battle checked Roosevelt's power after 1937, it hardly voided what Cohen calls the "greatest impact" of the hundred days: that "in just over three months, the federal government changed from being a nearly passive observer of its citizens' problems to an active force in solving them." Indeed, fears of dictatorship proved overblown. Far from acting by fiat, Roosevelt had to seek, and usually got, the cooperation of not just Congress but also the key constituencies whom his policies affected: bankers, businessmen, farmers. Without their consent, he could not have triumphed. "I cannot go any faster than the people will let me," Roosevelt once said, expressing his belief in the centrality of public opinion to modern democratic governance. It was a piece of realism that he deployed in 1933, forgot in 1937 and returned to when he pressed for American involvement in what began as an unpopular European war. Our new president would do well to keep this wisdom in mind well beyond his own first hundred days. David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University, is a columnist for Slate and the author of "Nixon's Shadow."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Written by an editor of the New York Times, this well-researched narrative of Franklin Roosevelt's first months in the White House approaches the fabled Hundred Days through five of FDR's executants. Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace were present at the creation of the New Deal, remaining dependably liberal administrators throughout FDR's presidency. At the start, too, were the chief of FDR's brain trust, Raymond Moley, and budget director Lewis Douglas, who, in contrast, became disenchanted out-of-office critics of the New Deal. Through a mixture of biography and chronicle, Cohen productively recounts the roles of his quintet in the political drama of the Hundred Days. His profiles impart the background and political inclinations each person brought to Washington, while his descriptive detail brings to life the capital city's beaten look and mood of crisis in early 1933. With his emphasis on the influence of his five protagonists on the alphabet agencies created in the Hundred Days, Cohen captures the flow of power at a crucial historical moment, which is always a winning formula to readers of political history.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Times editorial board member Cohen (coauthor, American Pharaoh) delivers an exemplary and remarkably timely narrative of FDR's famous first "Hundred Days" as president. Providing a new perspective on an oft-told story, Cohen zeroes in on the five Roosevelt aides-de-camp whom he rightly sees as having been the most influential in developing FDR's wave of extraordinary actions. These were agriculture secretary Henry Wallace, presidential aide Raymond Moley, budget director Lewis Douglas, labor secretary Frances Perkins and Civil Works Administration director Harry Hopkins. This group, Cohen emphasizes, did not work in concert. The liberal Perkins, Wallace and Hopkins often clashed with Douglas, one of the few free-marketers in FDR's court. Moley hovered somewhere in between the two camps. As Cohen shows, the liberals generally prevailed in debates. However, the vital foundation for FDR's New Deal was crafted through a process of rigorous argument within the president's innermost circle rather than ideological consensus. Cohen's exhaustively researched and eloquently argued book provides a vital new level of insight into Roosevelt's sweeping expansion of the federal government's role in our national life. (Jan. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Assistant editorial page editor of the New York Times, Cohen shows how FDR's closest advisers helped push him in a radical new direction in his first few months in office. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Journalist Cohen (The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, 2002, etc.) delves into the New Deal archives to fashion an elucidating, pertinent and timely work on the makings of government. The slew of progressive legislation passed during Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933 broke with the old order of laissez faire economics and redefined the nature of government's responsibilities vis--vis its citizens. These policies had critics, to be sure, but they worked, Cohen notes, alleviating people's misery during the Great Depression by offering relief, jobs and, most important, hope. While FDR largely garnered the credit for the country's recoveryand aroused alarm with his autocratic proclamations and tacticshis handpicked minions worked tirelessly behind the scenes to forge the New Deal's landmark programs, often by trial and error. Cohen closely examines the five members of Roosevelt's inner circle who left the most lasting mark on the legislation forged during those 100 days, looking in turn at where they came from, how they gained the president's trust and how they used their experience to make history. Since the banking crisis was FDR's first concern, he chose trusted aide and speechwriter Raymond Moley to work alongside the Treasury Department on the Emergency Banking Act, which tackled the essential tension between spending more to fight the Depression and spending less to balance the budget. Budget Director Lewis Douglas, a conservative, pushed through Congress the Economy Act, a major budget-reduction measure, but he resigned in 1934 when Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace saved the farm belt with the Agricultural Adjustment Act; Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first female Cabinet member, persuaded FDR to support her ambitious progressive agenda, including workers' rights protections; Harry Hopkins became the leading public-works administrator. Ambitious yet well focuseda marvelously readable study of an epic moment in American history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
